Making America Work For Ukraine

The first week of September 2024 saw most orc progress towards Pokrovsk blunted, a noose tighten around isolated ruscist troops in Kursk, and a series of outright terror raids against Ukrainian education centers. Also, on the technology front, some savvy Ukrainian techs have managed to make dragons a reality, technologically speaking.

This will be a two part post: first a look at the fronts, then the intersection of Ukrainian and American politics, since there’s apparently an election on or something. Guess I’d better get that box prominently labeled “partisan junk” put out by the mailbox. the joy of being in a gerrymandered swing district the Democrats nearly lost in 2022…

Though as I’ll get into, there are small advantages. Ukraine seems set to shift its diplomatic posture in a more aggressive direction, something I’m 100% on board with.

I had intended to include a section looking at Ukraine’s counteroffensive options for the emerging Autumn 2024 campaign, but it deserves a focused post. Instead of trying to go in too many different directions I’ll publish a detailed analysis towards the end of the week.

Weekly Overview

Pokrovsk continued to bear the brunt of orc attention this week, though progress towards the logistics hub itself has almost completely stalled. In fact, over the past week Moscow has only managed to take a few more blocks in Hrodivka, a low-lying area that can be pounded from the ridge to the northwest.

Moscow has continued to advance on the broader Pokrovsk Front, however, pushing soldiers south from Memryk to the outskirts of Ukrainsk and Hirnyk. This move adds additional pressure on the main logistics route supporting a group of Ukrainian brigades with troops east of the Vovcha.

That’s why some are bothered that Syrskyi said that the orcs hadn’t advanced a single meter towards Pokrovsk in six days. However, though somewhat misleading, the broader claim is not without merit: the timely arrival of reinforcements has broken the offensive’s momentum.

The map of the area can’t tell the whole story, and georeferenced data is just the tip of the iceberg. Throughout the orc push over the Vovcha from Prohress to Novohrodivka, intense assaults have been attempted on a ridge overlooking the Kazenyi Torets along the northern flank. But the lines haven’t moved around Vozdvyzhenka despite the Kostiantynivka-Pokrovsk highway sitting just 5km from the nearest orc position.

Interestingly, the brigade leading the defense in this sector, 110th Mechanized, is the one that held on in Avdiivka for two years until a lack of artillery ammunition amid bloody human wave assaults forced them out. Just two months later they were replenished and back on the line, quietly holding firm alongside the other forces in the sector against repeated assaults.

Ukraine thus maintains an important stronghold along the edge of the ruscist bulge as it stretches towards Pokrovsk. The brigades sent to hold the line are tough formations, but interestingly they don’t seem to have been drawn from a deep operational reserve, instead coming from quieter fronts. Several brigades that I’ve been waiting to see appear still haven’t. More surprises are in store.

93rd Mechanized Brigade is an unusually large and highly experienced brigade, formerly covering the southern flank of the Chasiv Yar front alongside Fifth Assault. It appears to have replaced the hard-fought 47th Mechanized in Pokrovsk. The 47th was supposedly slated for rotation two months ago, only another brigade got mauled in the process, forced the tired formation back into action.

Along with the 93rd have come two Offensive Guard brigades: 14th Chervona Kalyna and 15th Kara-Dag, both having fought in the Robotyne-Verbove area after the 47th, 82nd Air Assault, and a couple other brigades left. The Offensive Guard brigades seem to be lighter but still tough, good on the defense and in urban spaces. 71st Jager, which at least partially moved from Pokrovsk to Kharkiv, is back again working alongside 151st Mech near Hrodivka.

I suspect that it was the 47th rotating out that enabled Moscow to push through Novohrodivka, a move that unseated the rest of the Vovcha line. Nearly every significant ruscist advance this year has come soon after a brigade level rotation.

An incoming unit always requires a few weeks to acclimate itself to an area. In Iraq, insurgents often went after newly arriving battalions when they weren’t yet entirely used to the ins and outs of their operational area. After a baptism of fire, the intensity died down as the insurgents ran out of surprises and the unit developed better relations with the locals.

There’s a deeply tactile aspect of warfare at every scale. Good commanders were said by the Germans to develop an intuitive feel for the ebb and flow of combat and the impacts of terrain and morale. Naturally they came up with a long and complex word to describe something ineffable, Fingerspitzengefühl, which is something I appreciate about Germans. Less so the SDP, enablers of fascism in the 1930s and now 2020s.

To simulate this, orc generals are constantly innovating new tactics that get a lot of their soldiers killed to power steady, if mostly incremental, gains. Constrained by a bad strategy of trying to occupy Ukraine in the first place and an operational paradigm that insists they must be attacking or resources are obviously being wasted, all any orc general can do is alter the number of soldiers who participate in each attack and vary the intensity of these over time.

The latest shift is to send groups of two or three men to infiltrate as far as they can. The twenty percent who manage to get between Ukrainian positions hold tight and wait for others to arrive. Eventually they can swarm Ukrainian units, forcing them to retreat while artillery further reduces the orc numbers and the insanity starts all over again.

It is now apparent that the orcs abandoned the attempt to reach Kostiantynivka earlier this summer – sooner than I realized. Attacks on Chasiv Yar have slowed as resources moved to Toretsk and Kursk. The steady push through Krasnohorivka south of Pokrovsk and the latest effort to seize ground near Vuhledar are part of the same shift. They’re serious attacks, but ultimately supporting efforts in a lunge west towards Pokrovsk and Velyka Novosilka. Moscow must fear the threat Ukrainian forces pose to the Mariupol sector, particularly Volnovakha, just an artillery shot southeast of Vuhledar.

The Toretsk area saw a substantial counterattack by the veteran 12th Offensive Guard Azov Brigade that allowed Ukraine to reclaim positions in Niu-York around an industrial area the orcs had surrounded. Moscow’s push here has largely stalled, with intensive efforts to advance west and east of the town thwarted. The fall of either Toretsk or Chasiv Yar appears increasingly unlikely barring a massive last gasp effort by the orcs. Ukraine’s reinforcements should be arriving right at the moment the orcs render themselves vulnerable through exhaustion trying to reach Pokrovsk.

Plans for a broader counterattack against the Pokrovsk bulge on the northern flank might already be well developed. After the orc push into Kharkiv this May, I was taken by the large number of Ukrainian brigades that swiftly appeared to halt it. The Kursk Campaign revealed why: once the orcs committed, Ukraine had a chance to stop their progress then unleash a counterblow in the vicinity, Kursk being not too far from Kharkiv. The same pattern could play out north of Avdiivka in the coming weeks.

Vuhledar has seen some notable ruscist advances over the past week, also allegedly coming after Ukraine pulled a veteran brigade, 72nd Mechanized, and swapped in a still-unidentified new one. Another explanation could be that 72nd only pulled back from some low-lying positions taken in 2023 in favor of better ones slightly farther north. Could easily be some combination, though I hope the brigade gets a break. It and the 47th could make a potent combination in late October.

79th Air Assault wiped out another (and increasingly unusual) mass armor attack near Kostiantynivka (not the city further north with the same name). 33rd Mech is in the thick of it here too, and 31st Mech seems to have been moved in as an operational reserve after getting knocked out of Prohres. So far, Pokrovsk and Kursk drawing away nearly all orc reserves required to accomplish more than creep west one tree line at a time. Something may still change, but the loss of Vuhledar would not be fatal.

Further afield, despite some skirmishes along the Dnipro, almost the entire southern flank of the warzone has gone rather quiet. There’s the standard drone and artillery harassment and some skirmishing, but nothing of real operational significance seems to be happening as reserves flow elsewhere. Ukraine might be tempted to take advantage.

The long arc of the front from north of Bakhmut all the way to Kharkiv has seen a reasonable amount of action, but little orc progress. Moscow has launched numerous attacks in the Terny, and Makiivka areas and there’s been a bit of actual expansion of control around Pischane, but the fighting has the character of Moscow trying to pretend its reserves aren’t running dangerously thin.

Heavy fighting hasn’t really stopped on the Kharkiv Front in Vovchansk and Lyptsi, but aside from some attacks and counterattacks near Hlyboke little ground has been seen to change hands.

Moving to Kursk, Zelensky has openly confirmed that Ukrainian troops intend to stay to maintain a buffer zone against ruscist attacks on Sumy. In power politics terms this amounts to a dare: if Putin wants to prove he’s russia’s defender, he can come take on the good folks with 82nd Air Assault, 22nd Mechanized, and half a dozen other brigades. He can wipe out his own towns with glide bombs and lose a hundred thousand conscripts merely pushing Ukraine into fortifications constructed at russian expense along the border.

Ukraine doesn’t even have to take any more territory, just remain a thorn in Putin’s side. However, evidence suggests that Ukraine will slowly lever the enemy out first Glushkovo, then much or all of Rylsk.

Despite all efforts by orc engineers, pontoon bridges over the Seim keep going down or get blown up by drones en route. There is talk of ruscist troops looting Glushkovo’s shops for supplies and bands of deserters looking for a way out of the trap. If Ukraine unleashes a couple brigades from its territory in a new incursion to the north, the three thousand or so orcs here will be trapped.

While both sides are rushing to construct contiguous defenses, Ukraine is likely ahead of the game. The orcs presently hold a few key outposts and rely on artillery and airpower to prevent Ukraine from pushing between in large numbers. This allows raiders to get through and hit the L’gov-Rylsk highway, adding to orc logistics troubles. Conscripts at the front keep getting surrounded, with regulars crushed trying to break them out.

Ukraine is fending off counterattacks despite Moscow allegedly moving 60,000 soldiers to the area. Most still appear to be concentrated to the east and north, with Moscow struggling to keep those on the western flank supplied. Korenovo is holding out, but if Ukraine does push in from the west towards Rylsk to isolate Glushkovo, the garrison could wind up trapped too.

Despite receiving only a fraction of the armored vehicles and jets I’d have said a year ago were necessary for Ukraine to pull off something as epic as an invasion of russia, Ukrainians continue to defy the odds. Sadly, casualties remain needlessly high because Ukraine’s allies are still clinging to most of their best gear.

In the air war, the biggest news has been the newest orc bombardment tactic: hitting educational institutions just as the school year begins. Israel and russia follow the same strategic bombardment doctrine: annihilate civilian infrastructure to prevent the regime from providing services to the people and wait for public anger to rise.

It never works, but the Air Power Mafia abandoned science way back in 1945 when it was proven that immolating cities in and of itself doesn’t win a war – a threatened ground invasion was what finally convinced Japan to surrender after being neutralized by a naval blockade anyway. Their eternal fetish for a supposedly clean (for us), precise (see fine print) way of war only made the thing even worse for those labeled collateral damage.

Ukraine mercifully understands that the only targets worth hitting are those with a direct material role in the military logistics chain, factory to trench. Fuzzy targets like morale or will are a sign of inept critical thinking or insufficient resources to do anything less spectacular but more effective. That’s why Ukraine sends drones to hit hangars, factories, and oil infrastructure, not schools. Eventually bridges, locomotives, and power substations feeding factories will go down as russia is steadily dismantled.

The astonishing rate of technological development unleashed by this conflict is steadily making capabilities once reserved for world powers available to middle and small actors. Just like the proliferation of automatic weapons and portable anti-tank weapons made it possible for insurgents to hold out against superior forces almost indefinitely, good luck being a big country or empire trying to defeat a regional movement by force.

Drones are far from invincible, but the ability to deploy large numbers from dispersed locations makes stopping attacks a matter of having multiple coordinated layers of information. You also have to deploy enough resources to shoot down those that get airborne, as sooner or later they’ll become autonomous enough to perform a simple mission like hit a designated target or collect photos to beam up to a satellite. Electronic warfare poses its own challenges, so like air defense it isn’t comprehensive.

Ukraine has maintained a strong lead in the drone race, Moscow’s effective for their purpose but nowhere nearly as diverse as Ukraine’s. Thank decentralized innovation and entrepreneurship for that. The recent uptick in drones intercepting drones poses a serious threat to Moscow’s military effort, which is extremely reliant on a tight recon-fires loop to compensate for its many weaknesses.

Eventually, the things that are able to kill drones will multiply, forcing a performance arms race. Ultimately most drones will likely look and perform like miniature combat jets, backed by larger crewed aircraft with enough onboard power to run radars and electronic warfare packages while maintaining tight situational awareness.

For now, hundreds of separate drone enterprises are churning out tens of thousands of the things every month. Moscow lacks the industrial capacity to rapidly turn out countermeasures beyond affixing rubber pads and metal grates to armored vehicles.

As far as crewed aircraft go, no official word yet on what brought down the F-16 Ukraine lost a couple weeks ago. Rumors of friendly fire are plausible, but oddly specific in asserting that a Patriot system was to blame. With hundreds of teams running around equipped with shoulder-fired missiles, all it takes is one trigger happy dude at night to make a terrible mistake thinking he was hitting a cruise missile. Regardless, a mechanical malfunction or even pilot error are always possible in aviation.

At the risk of repeating myself on a semi-weekly basis, if Ukraine received the proper levels of support, the operational impact wouldn’t be so grave. At some point in September Ukraine’s F-16 pilot numbers were supposed to exceed twenty, which could mean more complex operations soon.

Perhaps right about the time Ukraine’s next counteroffensive wave begins. I’ll write a detailed analysis of that this week.

Strategic Brief – Self-Delusion And The West

Domestically, a major shakeup of Zelensky’s government was unveiled this week, a number of ministers being replaced. The departure of one, Foreign Minister Kuleba, came as a bit of a surprise, as he’s been the veritable face of Ukraine in diplomatic circles. The reasons for his departure appear to be a combination of fatigue and a need for a less diplomatic approach to Ukraine’s foreign affairs.

This sort of turnover is healthy; if Zelensky weren’t a potent public symbol at this point, swapping him out for fresh blood too wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing. As much as Abraham Lincoln is celebrated today, like most politicians, in military terms he was often a blazing idiot. Everyone blames his procession of admittedly inept generals, but Lincoln made grievous strategic errors that expanded the size and power of the Confederacy. He enabled rich Union scions to send other people, including immigrants conscripted straight off the docks, to fronts where they were ineptly used as cannon fodder by alcoholics like Grant to the bitter end.

You go to war with the politicians (and Secretaries of Defense, Rummy) you have, and Zelensky deserves immense credit for both staying in Ukraine during the invasion and keeping the country focused on victory. I have a hard time being too critical of a guy my age who faced down a challenge beyond anything 99.999% of human beings will ever endure with half his grace. He had the lovely experience of being told how very much Ukraine meant to NATO – but also that nobody was coming to save it.

As far as internal Ukrainian politics go, it’s a bit concerning how the name Yermak appears all over the place, but the emergence of a sort of palace vizier is standard even in democracies. He’s at least more competent than his counterparts in the USA and its pet, Germany, that much is clear. All an outsider can ask for. The whole Zelensky-Poroshenko feud is something Ukrainians get to work out for themselves.

Back to Kuleba – he adeptly managed a whole series of forced evolutions in Ukraine’s diplomatic approach, something his US counterparts would have struggled to pull off. Before the push to Kyiv, Ukraine was crying out for lethal aid and sanctions on Moscow in a bid to avert Putin’s assault. Immediately after it started, work shifted to getting the insider access needed to speed key decisions, like unlocking aid flows from partners.

Once the systematic atrocities committed by Putin’s soldiers were revealed, the humanitarian aspect of the fight took the fore, helping make the argument for giving Ukraine enough weapons to hold the line. This continued into the first winter as Moscow began destroying Ukraine’s power and heating infrastructure, accompanied by a rush of enthusiasm for turning the tide on the ground generated by Ukraine’s autumn counteroffensives.

By the second year of the war, the Biden Administration was visibly rattled by Putin’s nuclear threats, which amped up after Ukraine’s counteroffensives. Bidenworld began to drag its heels even more visibly than in early 2022, when Ukraine was slow to receive even HIMARS rockets for fear they would be fired into russia. Ukraine’s stunted summer 2023 counteroffensive was the result of a systematic failure to adequately equip Ukraine’s new brigades coupled to a ridiculous delay in beginning starting the process of sending F-16s.

From then on, Ukraine’s diplomacy was constantly fending off quiet pressure emanating from the Biden Administration to keep the media from focusing too much on Ukraine. Seen as a potential electoral liability alongside the bungled withdrawal from Afghanistan, Trump’s Ukraine skepticism gave Bidenworld a golden opportunity to pretend that it was the only force standing between Ukraine and defeat no matter how much or little it chose to do.

Kuleba has spent the past year fighting this induced fatigue, facing mounting obstacles making Ukraine’s case in the non-aligned world thanks to Biden’s bear-hug embrace of Netanyahu’s obliteration of Gaza. Ukraine’s diplomatic message was forced to shift away from one emphasizing human rights towards the more materialist focus on how much damage Ukraine was doing to russia with little proven risk to NATO. Basically, Ukraine had to come to grips with what every cause always does: Americans are encouraged to look for a fresh cause, leaving management of the old one to partisan hacks and bureaucrats who want a cost-benefit analysis (biased, of course, but let’s not get into that frustrating aspect of policy).

Not the time has come for another and far more aggressive shift: warning Ukraine’s fainthearted allies that victory will come with or without them. In the second scenario, winning will just take longer, consume more lives and capital, and possibly lead to both russia and Ukraine falling apart. But one way or another, Ukraine is going to pay russia back and then some. If you want a say in how that happens, get on board and ship some hardware.

Kursk was the start of something much bigger. It was the strike that knocked the enemy off balance, revealing it to be all but tapped out on spare resources. The next will hurt even more, and the one after that just might be fatal. This is ideal, because all the nasty escalation scenarios terrified Ivy League minds can conjure up are on the table because of their own inaction. They can’t escape them by pretending that Ukraine can be placed on a leash and threatened with and end to support for acting far less violently than NATO would in a war of similar intensity.

What’s kind of funny is that for all the billions shoveled into the USA’s military-industrial-media complex, experts across the system continue to be shocked by what Ukrainians can accomplish with a fraction of the resources. They are so France and Britain circa 1940-1942, just waiting for an aggressive challenger to teach them the harsh lesson that a PhD making a pronouncement does not constitute science.

As one of my favorite pastimes is punching well-paid types who keep giving policymakers bad advice while collecting a paycheck, the reliably banal Michael Kofman is back trying to undermine Ukraine’s fight in another pitiful Foreign Affairs piece. It defies explanation how a guy who built a career on hyping Putin’s military reforms still gets taken seriously… oh wait, no it doesn’t, not one bit. This is how popular scholars play their boring careerist game.

The article hardly dignifies a response, broadly repeating the same tired line that Ukraine is doomed because russia looks big on maps. As far as a brand goes that’s about as sustainable as being Sears in a world dominated by Amazon (until it kills itself off in due time), doomed to be mocked as heartily down the line as Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” blather. Funny enough, that one also continues to push his own silly brand, like a bunch of other center-left popular historian types associating himself with Ukraine whenever it makes the news.

Portraying Kursk as a “gamble” not only directly spreads Putin’s own chosen propaganda about the operation, it demonstrates a poor grasp of both the strategic and operational aspects of the conflict. This is part of the endless negging chorus that sought to portray Ukraine’s fight as doomed even before Putin’s march on Kyiv. International Relations as a discipline is broken, what can I say? So much for that fancy undergrad degree…

When the information ecosystem is so badly contaminated by pseudoscience, small wonder US policy towards Ukraine continues to be a weird combo of self-serving and self-destructive. One journalist who really seems to get the dynamics undermining Ukraine’s resistance is Stefan Korshak of the Kyiv Post. His latest piece does an amazing job of laying out, in appropriately scathing terms, the hypocrisy of the Biden-Harris approach.

Korshak lives in Kyiv and is also in touch with lots of soldier types – he seems to actually get the life. He’s appropriately critical of the Zelensky Administration but also US authorities. I don’t focus a lot of criticism on Ukraine’s leadership because I figure that isn’t my job, barring obvious screwups. If I come across as defending Ukraine’s government it’s because I’ve identified a deliberate information war effort waged by Americans bent on speaking for Ukraine wherever they are able.

That I’m obligated to fight as I can, being a taxpayer and voter in a country ten times bigger than Ukraine. Ukrainians are fully capable of holding their own leaders accountable.

Korshak does a brilliant job of showing how leaders in Ukraine and the US engage in some truly atrocious spin. This week, Syrskyi, sat for an interview with Christiane Amanpour of CNN where he asserted that Moscow’s troops hadn’t advanced a single meter towards Pokrovsk for six days. While technically true in a limited sense, this gave the impression of a situation now entirely under control when this still isn’t strictly the case.

Still, on the whole he pretty obviously meant to convey was obviously something like we sent in reinforcements, and the enemy’s operational progress ceased. That Moscow is still moving south along the Vovcha a kilometer or so every couple days is likely a function of the brigades east of the river already largely falling back. If the rearguard is cut off by a sudden orc lunge, they still have a way south through territory held by 46th Airmobile Brigade, which recently did a bang-up job smashing a large orc push using armored vehicles – something increasingly rare these days, because the Soviet stocks are running dangerously thin.

Korshak brilliantly pivots from scolding Syrskyi for his poor choice of words (or inept spin, if you prefer) to making a case for viewing recent statements made by Biden-Harris administration officials as infinitely worse. Another big NATO Ramstein meeting recently wrapped, with members proudly announcing their newest round of aid for Ukraine. To sum up – it’s peanuts on the whole, though obviously the individual contributions were generous.

Spain is contributing an old Hawk air defense system. Canada is sending a battalion’s worth of decommissioned armored vehicles and a whole bunch of rocket motors, the last potentially highly useful if given new warheads and a laser seeker to mitigate the inaccuracy of rocket barrages now delivered by Su-25 strike jets and helicopters. There’s other stuff, too, but nothing near the quantities Ukraine truly needs.

Separately, US leaders are talking up a new $250 million package and the prospect of maybe in the future letting Ukraine have some air launched cruise missiles with quite a long range. Of course, they’re also refusing to budge on Ukraine being allowed to use the US, UK, and French missiles they already have inside russia. Even if that changes, Moscow has already dispersed most of its formerly vulnerable aircraft.

If your true geopolitical aim is to preserve Putin’s empire as a convenient foil far into the future, this is exactly the set of policy choices you make. What’s funny is that Ukraine continues to develop new solutions to the artificial problems created by Biden Ukraine Czar Jake Sullivan faster than he can spawn new ones.

Luckily drones are relatively easy to develop at a small scale then ramp up production once you know what works. Tanks and jets are another matter, though. Ukraine continues to be drip-fed small infusions of essential arms in a pattern that exhibits a clear desire to keep Kyiv as dependent on D.C. as possible – which is exactly what orc propaganda argues!

Despite there now being close to zero possibility of Moscow launching a sizable ground invasion of NATO so long as it is fully committed to its failed war on Ukraine, NATO under US leadership continues to act as if it needs to be prepared to fend off a march to Berlin. Being ready for a contingency has become a sick excuse for clinging to armored vehicles Ukrainian soldiers desperately need now, as well as not immediately securing the airspace of western Ukraine to prevent more drones and missiles from hitting NATO soil.

Not too far from where I grew up in northern California is a place called the Sierra Army Depot. In it sit hundreds of Abrams tanks, Bradley IFVs, and M-113 APCs, all of which could have long ago been shipping out to Ukraine. Now, consider the fact that there’s about six billion dollars in American Ukraine aid set to expire at the end of September. Assuming that Ukraine’s account is charged the depreciated cost, that’s enough cash to give Ukraine everything in the base.

Across NATO there are hundreds of Leopard 2 tanks and thousands of IFVs and APCs equipping brigades that sit around waiting for a russian invasion which a bunch of light infantry backed by drones could crush at this point. China is too far away to pose a direct threat to Europe for at least a few more decades, and if the Islamic World were ever to unite the first target would be Israel, not Greece or Bulgaria, even if Erdogan of Turkey is the new Caliph (oh how he dreams!).

At the same time, Ukrainians are largely forced to fight using Soviet gear. What’s more, NATO is demonstrating that in any existential crisis the alliance would probably crack. Article 5 is being used as an excuse to not give Ukraine support that might trigger its being invoked, a paradox that simply begs for Moscow to test the waters by probing Finland or Estonia if it can secure a freeze on the battlefields in Ukraine.

Fortunately, the value of NATO lies in serving as a coordinating mechanism for coalitions of willing members to respond in an emergency. Even if half of NATO shirks, there’s enough combat power in the East and North to tackle Putin provided that the West and South aren’t distracted in Africa or Asia like the US so dearly desires.

Unfortunately, if a war lasts for years the industrial base becomes the deciding factor, and NATO remains dangerously dependent on the USA. That’s changing, though, thanks to the Ukraine War, and as European defense companies lower their costs by siting production centers in Ukraine, the bell is set to toll for the US military-industrial-media complex in a few years.

And that, I’m afraid, is another reason the US clearly does not want Ukraine to win this war. A final one is partisan politics. The Biden-Harris Administration has chosen to string Kyiv along, quite visibly attempting to force voters who care about Ukraine into a corner come election time.

This is how the Democratic Party brand operates: take interest groups captive by making promises the leadership doesn’t intend to keep. Fear of the other side winning and setting policy is enough to blackmail voters into not demanding accountability. Student loans, climate change, you name it, they’re into pretending to care.

The implicit framing embedded in presenting Harris and Walz as America’s prospective mommy and daddy – I’m not even being facetious or sarcastic here – is that all good Americans are supposed to shut up and trust the authorities. Dick Cheney, George W. Bush’s malevolent Vice President, even endorsed Harris, a sign of just how warped the moral universe is in modern America.

The USA is heading into another brutally close election, the margins in the states that will decide the Electoral College bound to be close to or less than 1%. Harris-Walz is mirroring the trajectories of both the Clinton and Biden campaigns in the polls, though behind where their predecessors stood after Labor Day, when most non-partisans start paying attention. The recent pattern has been for the polls in November to look worse for the Democrat than in September, with these still overestimating Team Blue’s actual vote share. So unless the debates turn out to be a genuine game changer without recent precedent the Democrats are in trouble.

A close race very likely goes Trump’s way. His team is already starting up a new Stop The Steal con, preparing to allege inconsistencies and glitches at the local level in key states. The objective is to power lawsuits after the election shrouded in the language of voting rights that ultimately convince the Supreme Court to throw out key states’ Electoral College votes. This was suggested as a solution during the dispute over Florida’s in 2000.

If the election is close, then we get to see whether Republican officials go along with Trump’s legal shenanigans this time around. If the Supreme Court comes up with some excuse to assert that one or a few state level results being contested in court means their Electoral College votes get thrown out, the Contingent Election process that gives each state one vote for President in the House kicks in. It almost certainly favors Trump.

No amount of shock or scorn about the latest gross or inaccurate thing Trump says is likely to change the fact that between 45% and 50% of the electorate likes or even loves the guy. The Democrats lack any solution to this, or the reality that if the Republicans start viewing every election they lose as stolen democracy is functionally dead anyway.

As for myself, I’ve decided that the only way I’ll vote for Harris or any other Democrat is if Ukraine is promised at least 300 M1A1 Abrams tanks, 600 M2 Bradley IFVs, and 1,200 M113 and Stryker APCs from US stocks, deliveries beginning before the election. That’s enough to outfit about ten to twelve brigades. With this force, Ukraine can cut the land bridge to Crimea by next summer, if not sooner, and possibly even win the whole war by the end of 2025.

At some point, American leaders have to be held to certain objective standards. Ukraine asked for support of this magnitude two years ago and received just a fraction. Supporters of Ukraine have a unique opportunity to demand accountability from our leaders and demonstrate that we aren’t compelled to turn out for any candidate or party. Just as supporters of a long overdue ceasefire in Palestine are warning the Democrats that their turnout isn’t guaranteed, Ukraine’s allies in the USA should do the same. If holding the bastards hostage while we can is what voters have to do, then so be it.

As for Trump, I’m avowedly non-partisan, but putting Vance on the ticket means the risk of his actively attempting to cut Ukraine aid is too high to even suggest that he might be good for Kyiv in the end. It’s possible, but doubtful based on lack of evidence. The generic Libertarian who runs, West, or even Stein are superior. At least voting third party sends a measurable signal of dissatisfaction with the status quo, a warning that demand is going unmet.

The Democrats fail to see that only by demonstrating strength abroad can they hope to escape the narrative of feckless weakness the Republicans are set to construct. Forcing Netanyahu into a ceasefire and fully arming Ukraine might not look like wins to pollsters, but they’re what will demonstrate the raw material backbone that non-partisan voters, difficult-to-poll types, tend to look for.

If Harris can’t find a way to win them over in sufficient numbers to generate a landslide the way Obama did, Trump probably wins, by hook or by crook. And though I fully expect the Democrats to happily morph into a permanent loyal opposition even if democracy were outlawed tomorrow, the level of angst across the USA is to a point that the supporters of whichever side loses might just explode.

A major question facing Americans after this election is whether they are willing to be governed by the side they despise even if they no longer believe it will respect the rules of democracy. America’s intellectual class can avoid the question for as long as they like, but that doesn’t mean people aren’t already asking it. Many have long been, if quietly. BrightLineWatch, a non-partisan, pro-democracy research group, ran the study I linked to, breaking down whether Americans would support their regional group of states seceding to form new unions. Support ranged from 30% in the Rust Belt to 44% in the South – with the Pacific coming in second at 39%. In 2021.

Give Americans an option short of secession, say splitting the federal government up, keeping a limited residual supranational bit in D.C. to handle the federal reserve and nuclear deterrent, and a majority might consider it. That’s a devastating indictment of the political status quo. It also explains why BrightLineWatch hasn’t asked this question on later survey waves. Certain truths are taboo in American society.

Failing to admit vulnerability doesn’t make it go away, though. Like Putin’s adamant refusal to accept the emergency that Kursk represents, all this does is tell the enemy they’re on the right track.

Self-delusion is dangerous; it’s also the default setting in politics. My standing hypothesis is that the perils of war have forced Ukraine to shed this tendency to enough of a degree that slips like Syrskyi’s are evidence of the difficulty communicating military science, not a desire to deceive.

Across much of American society, to participate in a shared delusion is now held as a kind of moral virtue. But how do you expect to defeat any enemy when you so resolutely refuse to understand either them or yourself?

All American leaders have to do to prove me wrong in this is act with due haste to arm up Ukraine. No more excuses.

Concluding Thoughts

Inertia is a powerful thing, and though some 60% of Americans are perpetually dissatisfied with the federal government, precious few are willing to tolerate violence to force a change. Fortunately, though I write about it in my fiction, I sincerely doubt anything like a civil war is possible in today’s USA.

More probable is a permanent state of twilight, a slow grind to irrelevance marked by America’s allies taking what they can from the alliance while it lasts. When Institutions decay, this is often the only way to salvage anything of use. There is a tremendous amount of good that decades of taxpayer subsidized military bloat has stockpiled which can serve Ukraine.

I wouldn’t mind less military hardware sitting around stateside, just in case. Time to invert Kennedy’s exhortation: ask not what you can do for America, ask what America can do for Ukraine.

In Ukraine’s case, America can first do the one thing Americans have historically done better than anyone else: ship a whole lot of guns. Then America can let Ukraine use them however the situation demands.